Change and Dharma

“Your dad has a new job opportunity,” Mom led in. “How would you feel about the possibility of moving?”

Ready. Anxious. A new adventure.

I was in sixth grade at the time. We didn’t go, but for months I wondered what life would be like if we had. What is it about the allure of change? The new?

To this day, I cannot look at beautiful picture without a little rising in me: Where is this? I must know. I have to go. There. Somewhere. No, anywhere. Mountains. Beach. City. Little town, one stoplight, a general store and ivy crawling up the sides of abandoned homes. Middle of nowhere.

It’s hard, I think, for people to understand this pervasive restlessness. To identify with the free spirits of the world. The ones who push expectations aside. After all, habit or human nature, far more common is the desire to cement life’s details into the earth. To force their permanence. To have peace of mind that, in this rocky roadmap of existence, what’s here today will be here for us tomorrow too.

But just as the leaves drop from trees, change is essential to our cycle too. The willingness to embrace different and new – to trust in life’s current, respond to its calling – holds a magic unmatched and untouched by little else. It's freedom from outcome. From control. From forcing our path to fall in line with our plans, rather than allowing our plans to align with our path.

Centric to yoga practice is the acceptance of this universal rhythm, the ever-shifting nature of things. Of rolling with the punches. Of being in life rather than being content with the view we have created. And, of course, wrapping our arms around the idea of dharma, our true purpose. Then getting out of the way to let it unfold. Happen to us.

Last weekend a fellow yogi and I sat on the studio porch, talking about loving and living and teaching. “You don’t push the river,” she tells me. “It flows on its own.”